In Balance With This Life, This Death
by DreamsInBlackAndWhite
Summary: He hangs in the air for what seems like a lifetime. His eye are wide open. His fingers are scrabbling. His legs want to be back on solid ground. The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind. The events of Yassen's life.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I do not own the Alex Rider series. **

_Hola! This is a very short chapter but it's the start of my new story. If you like it, tell your friends. If you don't like it, then tell me. Okay? All done here? Go ahead, read on!_

_The chapter title comes from the Coldplay song 'Violet Hill'. And you guessed it. I don't own that either. And the story title is taken from W.B Yeats's 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'. That's not mine._

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The train wails by loudly. The station master waves it off. The moon is high tonight, lighting the tracks. Tonight is perfect. Tonight is the night.

The signal is given and the next freight train puffs forward and stops, waiting for the station master to raise the barrier. The station master is cold. It is minus nineteen degrees out and he is thickly padded with a bulky coat and rather large, oddly shaped gloves.

He is busy. This is why he doesn't see the small figure dash across the tracks.

The small figure is not so thickly padded. His coat is barely more than a rag.

The small figure is shorter and frailer. His cheeks are pinched and he gives the impression of being hungry.

The small figure is a boy.

The boy climbs the steel ladder of the over-track platform quickly and crawls on his hands and knees across. With two sharp glances up and down the station he slides down the ladder and races across the concrete. He reaches the end of the station platform and jumps down, landing with a quiet crash in the middle of an over grown hedge.

The boy scrambles out of the hedge worse off than when he landed in it. His face and arms are now covered in thin scratches that sting. His coat is ripped along the sleeves. The boy gives no sign of pain or worry. He has eyes only for the freight train.

Swiftly, keeping the hedges between him and the track, he races along. He has practiced this for weeks. He can do it nine times out of ten. Which is not enough. He reaches the stretch of track where he has chosen to jump on. He has been planning this for an entire year.

He knows he has no hope of getting on the train while it is not moving. He will not risk being caught by the station master and sent to an orphanage. He knows his best chance is at the spot where he now stands.

There is an outcrop here, just big enough for it's purpose. It is close enough to the track for him to make the jump safely but far enough from the station that the station master won't see him jump on.

He is three hundred metres from the station and he watches in silence, hidden by bushes, as the train starts to pull out. He knows it will go slowly to build up speed for the first five hundred metres and he forces himself to calm down.

He has to get it right.

His palms are sweaty and he wipes them in the grass. He cannot lose his grip when he jumps or he will be crushed beneath the wheels of the train. The howl of the machine starts up. The tracks rumble. The whistle is blown twice. The station master waves off the freighter.

The boy waits.

The train is gradually closing the distance between them. Now it is two hundred metres from him. The tracks vibrations turn to a hum. The boy remembers a half forgotten science lesson. The tracks have expansion joints but tonight they won't be needed. It is too cold for the track to expand.

The boy waits.

The train puffs steam and smoke into the ink black sky. The tracks tremble in anticipation. The boy is trembling too. He cannot help it. His plans are coming to fruition tonight. The boy tries to remember his father's face. He's been trying to think of it for weeks but he still cannot remember it.

The boy waits.

The train ploughs onwards. One hundred and fifty metres and gradually closing.

The boy waits.

The train is building up a slight speed.

The boy waits.

The train is fifty metres from him.

The boy waits.

He can see the driver's face. The whites of the mans eyes.

Still he waits.

The carriages are in front of him now. He blinks. The wind they have snapped up rustles his hair wildly. He blinks again. Dust is in his eyes. Now the timber carriages are passing him, the ones with no sides.

The boy springs forward.

He hangs in the air for what seems like a lifetime. His eye are wide open. His fingers are scrabbling. His legs want to be back on solid ground.

Perhaps it is the airflow around the train. Perhaps it is God. Perhaps it is the Devil. Perhaps it is destiny. Or perhaps he simply failed to jump far enough. But he will not make a safe landing.

He can see this but he will not accept it. He wants to get on that train. He will get on that train. He will.

His fingers grip desperately at the edge of the carriage. He grabs it messily. His hand feels like it will be pulled out of it's socket. He swings himself forward, using his momentum, and lands in a heap on top of the stripped timber that occupies the carriage. A wave of exhaustion passes over him. He is ready to just fall into a deep, dream filled sleep.

But he is hungry. He is always hungry. There is not enough food in the world to fill the gaping void in his stomach. He must eat something.

He pulls off his jacket and takes a small kitchen knife from his pocket. The coat is clumsily stitched and the seams are easily sliced by the knife. The hem falls away raggedly. A tiny lump of bread and a small wedge of cheese fall out.

The boy nibbles at both then places them safely in the corner of the carriage where they won't fall out. All he can do now is wait.

All he can do now is hope.

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**Chapter over. What did you think? Should it just be deleted or should I keep going?**

**I'd also urge you to check out the forum I post in. It's called 'An All New Rating System For Stories' and I think you'd be surprised how great it is. Plus, if you do decide to visit, I might update the teeniest bit quicker...**

**Reviews are also a good way to persuade me too.**


	2. Chapter 2

_Disclaimer: I do not own the Alex Rider series or any characters relating to said series of books._

_YAY!! I'm back home after three weeks holidaying and updating again. Thank_ _you all so much for waiting politely for an update. This chapter is slightly shorter than I wanted but still, it is an update. I hope you enjoy and I'd love to hear a review from you._

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The boy hurls himself down the pile of timber, sprinting down the makeshift hill. Just before he collides with the end wall of the carriage he jumps with one foot planted. He imagines flipping majestically and landing on his feet with skill and grace beyond his years.

In reality, he crashes into the wall, his leg buckling, unused to supporting his weight with such force.

Before the explosion, he would have completed the trick with his eyes closed.

Slowly he hauls himself unsteadily to his feet and drags himself across to the far corner of the carriage. Shards of glass glitter and twinkle in the half light the moon casts on them. Slowly he stoops and picks up one of the jagged pieces.

Outside of the carriage, fields caked in snow rush past, the twilight lending them a tranquil, untouchable look. Dead crops lie around the countryside, bitter snow coating the remnants of forgotten farms.

Each view tells a different story.

But the boy has eyes only for himself.

Blond hair hangs limply over a pale forehead. Strands of hair cling to the nape of a neck. Pale blue eyes peer hungrily out at the world. They are serious. They are older than their owner.

The boy used to be lean. And strong. But months of malnutrition have taken their toll. What could once have been described as an athletic looking boy is now summed up with one word. Starving. He is hungry, not only for food, but something else that has no name.

The snow outside trickles to a halt and is replaced by rain. The boy pulls off his filthy t-shirt and holds it out of the carriage. Too soon, it is soaked through. His wraps his rag of a coat tightly around him and leaves the t-shirt in the corner to dry.

He is still holding the glass, something he hadn't noticed. But now his grip is tighter. His palm and index finger are bleeding profusely. The blood falls like tears to the ground with an almost inaudible splash. Almost.

He drops the glass with a gentle clatter and watches his blood drip to the dusty floorboard. Train tracks rumble past beneath those boards. In his blood, he sees his past.

_"It's like a gas. But it's spores spread much quicker through the air". His father's voice is deep and booming. He is happily showing his thirteen year old son the lethal poison he's working on. His son is happily holding the cylinder of colourless, floating gas that glints sinisterly. If the boy drops the gas...well, things will be nasty._

_"Potent?" the boy asks, his eyes full of curiousity and wonder. His father brushes away his unease at the boy's enthusiasm. Instead, he kindles the hope that one day his son might become a Bio Chemist as well._

_"Unbelievably. It eats away at the epidermis and melts your skin. Burns every single nerve in your body. In the end, you spine buckles and you spasm so hard your back snaps into eleven pieces. The water in your eyeballs boils away. Your brain melts then drips out of your nose. And that's just the nice part" his father describes vividly. _

_"Eww" the boy says cheerfully. He smiles._

This is the last time he has smiled in months.

He wasn't so cheerful when it was his father's brain dripping onto the floor.

He wasn't relishing the sheer gore when it was his mother vomiting up feces and hydrochloric acid.

He wasn't so curious when it was his sister who was convulsed in spasms of pain in her bed, blood seeping from her eye sockets that did not see anymore.

He did not enjoy the morbid open grave pits they threw his family into. His neighbours eyes staring blankly up at him. The smell of rotting carcass. The flys buzzing on the bodies. The silence of the village. The snap of the bullet as they shot the survivors. His terror at the idea that they would shoot him. His stale breath bated in his mouth. The taste of sheer terror on his tongue. The hunger clawing his stomach. The sound of hiding. The guilt. The pain. The penance.

He looks down at his hand. Subconciously, he has scraped six letters in the dust.

His name. The name they gave him. The name he has not heard in months. The name is the dust. The dust is the name.

Things are no longer as clear as they used to be.

He opens his mouth to speak.

He has not spoken since the blast.

Can he still speak?

He coughs. It is the first sound he has heard in months.

Silence has ruled his world since the blast.

He has learned to walk and eat and hide and cry silently.

His life has been like a television on mute since the blast.

His voice is rough and hoarse. He barks the word in a coarse whisper. It seems slightly perverse. It seems so vulgar as it invades his kingdom of silence. The silence of his kingdom.

The blood has mixed with the dust word now. Blood and dust and word are one.

"Yassen".

Yes, to be quite clear, things are no longer as clear as they used to be.

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_You like?_


	3. Chapter 3

**Updated at last. Thank God. If you're reading any of my other stories, be aware they'll all be updated by Christmas Eve.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own the Alex Rider series.**

* * *

He remembers the memories.

Mama cries when the boy is in bed. She closes the door and he shrinks back under the threadbare blanket, brushing against his sister's hands, clutching teddy even in sleep. When the door closes, a penultimate silence graces the house. He prays for it to stretch and stretch and last forever. Or at least until morning.

But no. The peace breaks. The sobs seem louder the more he hopes for the silence to last. And it hurts. Each tear is a pinprick through his soul, the very essence of his being.

If this is love, it hurts.

_

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_

He knows what love is. Even as a young boy. To show your wife you love her, you must slap her across the face. Backhand her. Punch her in the guts. Twist her arm until it breaks. The other boys and girls in school walk with their mamas and papas. They smile at him, but no. No. Smiles are fake, phony. Masks to hide hatred, pure, undiluted disgust.

Mama doesn't smile. She did, before his sister was born. Before things changed. Mama cries a lot. She stops crying when Papa comes home. She tries to look pretty for him, but Papa loves her anyway. He loves her until she bleeds and falls to the floor, tired from all the loving.

He knows looking at Papa makes Mama sad. She hurts, inside. The boy wants to help, but he thinks about these things at night, his mother's sobs fresh in his ears.

He wonders about things. Why Papa smiles when he loves Mama. Teacher says it's wrong to hit a girl but what would she know? All the fake smiles, deceiving hugs, they're so...so superficial. So the boy tells himself he doesn't want them.

They're nothing.

Nothing.

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There's only one respite. One oasis in the desert of despair. A girl, in school. She's different than other girls. She's not like his sister, always looking for food, never speaking, with an almost simian air of starvation.

No.

He doesn't like the way she looks at him. Her eyes are full of worship and adoration. She hangs onto his every word, even though he is borderline mute. She follows him around the schoolyard and grins at him across the classroom.

She's kind.

He hates her. She is everything he despises, the hollow, forced affection he secretly craves. But week by week, she worms her way around his soul, his very essence. She is almost like a ventilator, helping him to breathe, to exist. He's been relying on her so long, relying on her to shed some of her reflected light on him, that now he just can't breathe without her. He despises her.

She adores him. He finds her repulsive.

But God, she helps. She makes it work. She makes him fell less like a plummeting pebble and more like a drifting leaf. He finds he can talk to her, talk around her, much easier than the others. She rejoices when, one day, he seeks her out in the yard.

He secretly loves her.

So he loves her like Papa loves Mama. He thumps her once and her eyes well up. He wants to call after her as she runs to tell Teacher.

_But no. No. I love you! Don't you see?_

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He goes quiet. Sometimes, he doesn't speak for days and wonders if perhaps he has ceased to exist. But he's solid. Papa is happy now that he has more work. He doesn't love Mama anymore but Mama still cries every night. To them, he does not really exist fully.

But life around him is so colourful and full. All the colours rage around him daily and he wants to speak up, to tell someone, anyone what he sees. But his jaw is heavy. He never gets the words he want, they elude him easily, never seeming within his grasp.

Still. Colours rush past him. Calming blues, shocking reds, wavy purples and blinding white snow. So clean and fresh. Everything outside him is loud and beautiful.

His eyes hurt.

So he proceeds with life. He talks to Papa, especially about his work. He loves to spend time in the plant. His sister stays at home with Mama and Papa takes him to see his work. But then, the blast. Boom. Bang. Life is over. And it begins.

* * *

Quiet and gloomy. He moves on while the others are still in the mass graves. The soldiers speak of a witch boy who hides in the woods. Silent and filthy and dressed in little more than rags. The boy tries to pretend that he is not who they speak of. That he is not alone.

What did he do?

He has been bad. He wronged them and now he must be punished. Some small part of his soul protests. What did he do? But instantly, the thought is lost among the guilty existence of the boy. He wonders if he is slowly going insane.

He is a witch. A dumb witch. He does not speak. The soldiers try and catch him. They wonder aloud if he can speak. He knows he can. But now the colours are gone and he has no-one to listen. He has reasons. Excuses. But still. It's all his fault. His fault.

The emptiness without Papa, Mama, his sister is too, too much. It chokes him and blinds him and he can't get through it and he can't speak and it clogs his throat and he knows he is bad and he wants to talk and his words gag him and never come out and he wants it to end, please God, Papa, let it end.

Poison. His thoughts are poison. They're grief, his pain. He separates himself from his thoughts, hoping to contain the insanity. But things are clearer now. Insanity is no longer his fear. He is not insane, nor will he ever be. He does not live, but he exists. And while he does this, he is...happy. It is more than he could have hoped for.

He wants to leave now, to be human again. He will talk, someday. The horrors of his life will drip from his mouth, drizzle from his memory, someday. Until then. Until then. He will exist. He will exist. The train will be his escape, the metal monster that ploughs through the remnants of the ghost town.

He will talk someday. He will.

He remembers. He resolved that to himself, on his knees in the snow. On the train, the boy shifts slightly. He barks out a rough laugh, the sound like sandpaper. He has grown so much from what he used to be. He can talk again.

He is...happy. While the train races across land, he feels himself pulling closer and closer to his destiny. Every second he moves closer. He smiles to himself. He feels alive again, for the first time in years. He wonders silently, almost cheerfully, if perhaps someday he will find another person like him.

Perhaps.

Someday.

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**Finito. Hope you liked it. Still working on the updates for my other stories, but, as I said above they will all be updated by Christmas Eve. Jusmine, your one-shot is being rewritten after my computer gobbled it. Will have it to you by next Sunday. Okay. I think that's it for now. Until next time. **


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer: I do not own the Alex Rider series or any characters pertaining to said series.**

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The boy switches trains many times on his journey, so many times that he can do it with his eyes closed by the end. First, you wait for the train driver to just touch his breaks and then you throw yourself out and roll, carefully holding your head with your hands. And then you scrabble to your feet and crouch and race across the tracks with your heart in your mouth, blood pumping frantically enough to almost burst your veins. You climb on just as the train starts to lurch away, and keep your head down until you're away. It's second nature for the boy now.

Every single rocking motion brings him that little bit closer to his destiny. He likes to think of elaborate ways he's going to live in Moscow. He's got it all down in his head. He's going to get a job as a chirpy little paper boy like the ones in the occasional American movies that get smuggled into Estrov. The ones with who call out the head lines. He knows it's naïve and not going to happen but it feels good to have a plan, to know what he's going to do.

And then, just as night is shrinking into day, the train gives one last huff and shudders to a halt and he knows, he just knows some how that this is it. He's here and he's ready.

The boy springs down gently from the train and moves stealthily across the awakening station. He hauls himself up onto the platform and ignores the looks he receives from the meagre prospective passengers as he drags himself out the gates. For a minute, he just stops.

Because it's so beautifully hideous, what he sees in front of him. He wants to cry and laugh but he can't. His cheeks hurt and he clenches his fists, starting down the street in the direction that seems less thronged. He's not exactly sure where he's going or why. He just walks and walks in a daze for what feels like a few seconds and then he finds himself sitting stonily by an alien river, feet dangling over the side.

He snaps out of his trance like state unhappily. He still feels empty, even though he's here now, here where he's wanted to be for so long. And still he feels a deep, crippling sadness in his heart. No, his soul. He's so sad that tears won't even come. And he can't explain why but he knows he can't let people see. No one must know the truth, ever.

He lifts himself up and shivers in his scanty rags, wandering slowly back along the river away from the rather large concentration of lights in the distance. He's pleasantly surprised to find himself walking alongside a railed in park, the fence of which is easily scaled.

And he almost drops down on the head of his destiny.

She's sitting there at the edge of the park shiftily, smoking a cigarette. She's looks like an angel. A tiny, black haired angel with a puffy bruise over one eye and a smear of blood on her cheek.

"Watch it!" She snaps out angrily, glaring at him with contempt.

He doesn't know why he stops there, standing with his hands socked into his pockets. Maybe it's how sad she looks, sad like him. Maybe it's how sad he feels. He moves closer to her slowly, as if he's about to wake a sleeping tiger. She doesn't look up as he slides to sit down on the freezing grass beside her.

"You got any money?" She asks suspiciously, shooting sparks of fury from her eyes. The boy shakes his head and her face hardens. She hasn't got any either, he can tell.

"You okay?" She sighs out, almost a whisper. The boy shakes his head again and she scoots an inch or so closer. She offers him the cigarette and he shake his head. She lifts her shoulders an inch as if she's too tired to shrug and takes a long, sharp drag.

They don't need to talk. The river gurgles along near them and she tosses the last fraction of cigarette away disdainfully. The boy picks at a few blades of grass and she starts to talk. She talks slowly and carefully at first and continues for what feels like a very long time. He doesn't hear most of it and what he does catch doesn't make much sense. She concludes with her name. Katya.

Even her name is beautiful and new.

"Yassen." The boy scratches out agonizingly, embarrassed and flushed and suddenly conscious of how filthy he is. Weeks of travel have streaked his clothes with coal and sweat and sticking to him.

"Do you want to come and sleep at my spot tonight? In the morning, we can get some money together and I'll show you the real Moscow." She offers generously. His eyes widen and he raises his eyebrows. He wants to tell her about how he's known better than this. How he used to have ten books, all his own, that he'd read. He wants her to know that he's better than this but the boy doesn't have the words.

"Why? Because. You look like you could use a friend. And you've got nice eyes." She answers his unspoken question with a grin. She leans in and swiftly plants a kiss on his lips and she tastes like cigarettes and earth but he doesn't mention it because he's sure he doesn't taste much better.

She stands up slowly and he looks up at her, following her every movement with alert eyes. She smiles again at him and slowly bats her eyelids and he feels stupid and awkward and out of place.

"Come on. I'm getting cold." She prompts.

The boy lifts himself back onto his weary feet with a slight stick of hesitance. How can he trust her? She begins to move away and he follows, because it's all he can do. She takes his hand and pulls him along, half skipping with evident glee.

"Just wait 'til I show the girls you. You're almost gorgeous. They'll all be jealous." She coos delightedly, tugging him along.

He wonders if perhaps he's maybe found a friend.

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**_Yay. We've fixed young Yassen up with a little company. I apologize for my pathetic lack of updating. A mixture of writer's lock and schedule delays. Really sorry. Hope to do better in the future. And I'd really love a review from you. _**


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